Well, it’s not exactly the latest model on the market, but Fujitsu’s AMILO PRO V3545NP which is made for the Windows® Vista (Microsoft has already announced its decision to expedite the retirement of the Windows® XP), is one of the laptops offered as part of Fujitsu’s highly discounted offerings to all tertiary students studying in Singapore.

Sadly though, a colleague of mine bought hers recently for $1998 from Funan the IT Mall instead, rather than taking advantage of the $1542.45 it retails for under Fujitsu’s scheme. So after a few days of testing and getting acquainted with this piece of hardware, I’ll be frank, I wasn’t really impressed but nonetheless the scheme handles pretty decently and here’s my autopsy report.

The Good
Fujitsu has always been known for its Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) Screens. And the AMILO certainly didn’t disappoint, all 15.4 inches of it for that matter. The picture resolution was clear and crisp. In short, the quality was fantastic and it definitely made watching Little Miss Sunshine a more enjoyable experience (I love the movie so much; I’d willingly watch it on a crummy old television screen anyway).

The NVIDIA® GeForce® GO 7300 128MB VRAM Graphic Card certainly provides avid gamers on a budget with something to cheer about. Testing the laptop with one of the newest games on the market, ARMA: Armed Assault proved to be a relative success as the game’s graphics seemed pretty smooth. But at this point I was also lamenting the laptop’s lack of processing power because I was playing the game way too close to its minimum requirements which I’ll explain in just a wee bit.

However since the laptop was designed for the Windows Vista, the Windows® Vista Business™ operating system, the AMILO does offer its users a good platform to do their work in style (and boy does it does look good really) on the large LCD screen.

The Decent
Armed with a 1.66GHZ Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor with 2MB L2 Cache and 667Mhz FSB, the AMILO certainly has a decent amount of processing power to fulfil multiple processes at once, so you can run Adobe Photoshop, a few Microsoft Word documents and listen to music all at the same time.

But then again, some might say that the AMILO is a tad underpowered considering the competition it faces out there in the market. And like I mentioned earlier, I felt that playing ARMA would have been a much more enjoyable experience had the laptop have more processing power.

The Bad
Music heals the soul but the placement of the ear jacks is a bone of contention for me. Alright, so the Amilo already provides quite a decent sound system for simple music enjoy. Plus, the jacks offer the optimal position to plug in one’s ear phones.

But being the guy who enjoys his music with plenty of bass (I admit, I absolutely love rock music), I tend to prefer plugging my laptop to my stereo system to get that desired effect. So plugging the necessary cable for my speakers was a rather cumbersome and irritating experience for me.

Weighing in at 2.8 kg, the AMILO’s like a relic in the weight department. Yes, it beats me lugging around my sister’s 3.1kg laptop, but considering the fact I stay in Tampines and my office is located in Clementi, the notion of developing my shoulder muscles by carrying the AMILO around isn’t that exciting, though it’d probably spare me from spending more time in the gym.

The Ugly
A laptop’s keyboard generally differs between models and brands. And sometimes, innovative designs tend to wind up as innovative annoyances. And my one major gripe with the Amilo is its keyboard which to me was a nightmare from Hell. Not only does it look weird, but the logic behind a Shift key being smaller than the Cap Lock key still confounds me. As a reporter, the need to type quickly is an essential part of my livelihood (in fact, I’d estimate it takes up 80 percent of my time), because if I can’t type, you wouldn’t be reading this article.

Hence, the fact that I found myself continually wasting time trying to get myself acquainted with the AMILO’s keyboard was really an annoying process that I still couldn’t get used to at the end of the day.

The Rest
The laptop comes along with 60GB of hard disk space along with the usual assortment of necessities like wireless capabilities, USB ports (3 in this case) and DVD/CD ROM drive. For me, to sum it all up, the AMILO is essentially a no-frills laptop which thankfully is armed with just enough processing power and a graphic card that allows for some computer gaming.

While I’m not exactly crazy about certain aspects of the laptop, especially its “unique” keyboard, I still like it nonetheless, especially since as a student I’ll only need to pay an extremely low price of $1542.45 when I order it directly, unlike my colleague’s $1998.